Provisioning Charleston : How Race Shaped Food and Eating in the Antebellum South

While scholarship has long recognized South Carolina's bondpeople for creating and sustaining one of the most profitable economies in world history, this farm-to-fork history highlights their role in producing and preparing food for residents of the most important city in the antebellum South.

Using evidence from traditional sources alongside material culture and archaeology, Provisioning Charleston significantly revises our understanding of the skilled expertise bondpeople wielded in the production, distribution, and preparation of foodstuffs for both their enslavers and themselves.

Examining not only what Southerners ate but how and why they made those choices, this work demonstrates racial identity was historically more important in shaping culinary culture than legal status or economic class.

This innovative history brings together the contemporary topics of food and identity, cultural appropriation, and memory, as well as systems of power and resistance.